Substantial Web Disruption Affects Many Websites and Applications

A widespread internet outage has affected dozens online platforms and applications worldwide, as users noting issues connecting to the web following issues at the web hosting service.

The disrupted services comprise the social media app Snapchat, Roblox, the messaging service Signal, and Duolingo, as well as several Amazon-owned services such as its primary shopping website and the Ring doorbell home security firm.

Throughout Britain, Lloyds bank was disrupted along with its branches the bank Halifax and the Scottish bank, with additional accounts of problems accessing the HM Revenue and Customs online portal on the start of the week. Furthermore across the UK, several Ring customers used social media to complain their home gadgets were not working.

Just within Britain, notifications of issues on particular platforms reached the tens of thousands for every service.

The company stated that the outage began in the eastern region of the United States at Amazon Web Services, a unit that provides crucial online backbone for a host of companies, who utilize capacity on Amazon servers. AWS is the biggest global cloud computing platform.

Just after midnight (PDT) in the America (morning UK time), Amazon confirmed “increased problem frequencies and delays” for the cloud services in a area on the east coast of the US. The ripple effect was seen to affect platforms worldwide, with the problem monitoring service showing problems with the same sites in various regions.

Cisco’s Thousand Eyes, a tool that tracks internet outages, further indicated a increase in outages on that morning, and numerous instances located in Virginia, the site of the AWS US-East-1 zone where the company stated the issues began.